Thinking

Sometimes you need to allow a field to lie fallow. Sometimes you need a break. Sometimes, if your life feels overwhelming and time is moving by way too fast, what you need is to inject silence and space for lingering to remind yourself what it is to feel human.

In Among the Agents, Dean Ball writes:

I joke sometimes that using AI, and especially using coding agents, is a bit like playing the piano. The piano is the easiest instrument to begin playing (anyone can produce a satisfying tone with no training or skill on a piano, which is not true of, say, a flute or a violin), yet the hardest to master in the long run. AI presents the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge computers can muster: a white sheet of paper, a blinking cursor in an empty text input box. You can type anything you like, but figuring out what to type, is, indeed, the hard part.

In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff argues that metaphors are not linguistic decor, not mere filigree for poetic embellishment. Rather, they serve a critical cognitive function:

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature … Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.

In Technology and the Lifeworld, philosopher of technology Don Ihde discusses how the invention of the clock radically shifted both humankind’s perception of time, as well as what we determined to be most salient in the measurement of time. With clocks, rather than “read the heavens” to ascertain the time of day, we now read a machine. The clock thus redirected our collective focus from the slower, subtly shifting rhythms of nature to the rigid regularity of a mechanical device.

Waaay back in 2021, in The Medium is the Medium, Nicholas Carr wrote:

One way to think about AI-based text-generation tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement … When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a very real way, communing with the dead.

Which leads me to wonder: Are we communing with the spirits of dead open source projects when we use AI programming tools? Are AI coding assistants really just clairvoyant interns?